Marvelous mark making!

This week, the children have been really motivated with their writing in choosing time, frequently opting to bring writing tools into their play, and accessing the writing areas with great enthusiasm! It’s lovely to see how Ash class are building their fluency with sound-letter correspondence and how Saplings are eager to practise their writing shapes. We have also started a handwriting group activity during Busy Fingers and this week the children were exploring vertical lines and ‘long ladder letters’, such as ‘l’. It’s so wonderful to feel the children’s excitement for writing and mark making.

In maths, the children have been sorting and creating their own groups based on different characteristics such as size, colour or shape. Even the sea creatures didn’t escape from the super sorting, as the children explored sorting them in lots of different ways, from spotty and not spotty, to those with fins and those without! We have also been developing our vocabulary across different areas of learning, looking specifically at the language of size. To describe small items, the children came up with words including tiny, little and miniature, and to describe larger items, we had words such as massive, enormous and gigantic!

The children also really enjoyed learning about different emotions, after listening to the song ‘Scribble Spot’ together. We spoke about feelings that made us feel good, like happiness and calm, and other feelings such as worry and anger. We discussed that all feelings are important and it is never bad to feel a certain way; it’s how we identify, manage and express our feelings that is important! After our carpet time discussion, the children enjoyed making up their own puppet shows filled with all different emotions. From a happy ending of a family jumping in puddles, to surprising moments of baddies being sent to jail, the afternoon really celebrated a rollercoaster of emotions!

Ash and Saplings have enjoyed our Tales Toolkit session this week, where we use resources to develop our own stories. This week, our story involved a firefighter called Bella who had to help rescue lots of things, including a whale, a truck and house, from a tree. She was very clever and used her hose to spray them down. The children’s ideas for this story were very creative!

The children have also been making good use of our water area outside, using guttering to channel water into buckets. It was lovely to see groups of brilliant minds working together to come up with solutions to problems they came across during their experimentation!